I was talking to Ray Lane a few weeks ago. And I was blown away - he was talking fluently about the ethanol yield from corn versus cane. He is spending half his time looking at green investments for Kleiner. Only towards the end of the conversation did we turn to software - social networking, Oracle ...yawn.

His former partner, Vinod Khosla, who made a ton in telecom and network plays is even deeper in to green investing.

President Bush spent considerable time in last week's State of the Union speech (and since) on alternative energy discussion.

Jason Corsello laments that SaaS pricing is going the way of more traditional software pretzel pricing. Darn industry analysts (he is with Yankee, but also a fellow Irregular) have to keep coining new terms.

To me, yes, if you are looking at lead qualification and management in isolation, software companies appear to be leading edge.

But you have to look at overall sales results:

They may have qualified leads but do not prepare their salespeople with lead intelligence. Most software sales people would fail this 15 minute first meeting guideline, my friend Brian Sommer and I wrote for Optimize magazine.

Software firms spend 25 to 50% in SG&A - that would bankrupt most of Forrester clients in other industries.

Software firms lose any front end advantage by fragmenting the rest of sales and marketing in to too many compartments. Not leading edge by most industry standards.

As the industry moves to SaaS, the marketing and sales model is going through changes as Phil points out...but today, take the Forrester advice with a pinch of salt. Or a shovel full.

History was made when President Bush addressed Speaker Pelosi as he delivered his State of the Union speech this week.

I think those 2 words got him more applause than the rest of the speech. We definitely lag the world when it comes to this metric. Here were some early and prominent office holders in other parts of the world

Of course, when I travel I hear all the time how sexist, racist the US is. My response is along the lines of what I wrote here. We do a lot of things right. We just need to do a few more right. Madam Speaker is a good start.

Leon Ho highlights tools which should allow the ordinary Joe to predict technology bowls (saw them courtesy of Sadagopan).

But my readers hopefully did not need much analysis to spot I did not post any 2007 predictions. I was humbled reading the spectacular misses below. And they did not even hedge Gartner style with probabilities.

Theoretically, television may be feasible, but I consider it an
impossibility- -a development which we should waste little time dreaming
about. - Lee de Forest, 1926, inventor of the cathode ray tube

I
think there is a world market for maybe five computers. - Thomas J. Watson,
1943, Chairman of the Board of IBM

It doesn't matter what he does, he
will never amount to anything. - Albert Einstein's teacher to his father,
1895

It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become
Prime Minister. - Margaret Thatcher, 1974

This 'telephone' has
too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of
communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. - Western
Union internal memo, 1876

We don't like their sound, and guitar music is
on the way out. - Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962